Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Effects are fun.

For a long time, my setup consisted of the Cat bass I introduced earlier, an 80w Crate bass combo amp (gift) and a twenty foot instrument cable. I had a Korg hand held tuner (also a gift) and that was it. It worked. Bass sounded good but not fancy, and my gear was on par with everyone else I was playing with. We never really got into an arms race as far as instruments or amps were concerned. My first pedal which I got for $20 (included shipping) off of eBay was Zoom 506 Bass multi-effect pedal. I'll probably review it next. I used it mostly for the integral tuner, and didn't really do anything too crazy with effects. Pedals and effects in general seemed like something for guitarists, and were a layer of complexity I didn't really want to get involved with.

Then last October I read a piece in Bass Player magazine by Bryan Beller. Apparently when he's not writing for BP he's the touring bassist for Dethklok, which is awesome. He wrote a great article about putting together a pedal board and the general use of effects for bass. I've been using it as my own personal jumping off point for putting together my own pedal board. Hopefully I'll be able to pass on some of the stuff I've learned though this blog. As of right now, my goal with effects is to improve my live sound. That and be able to play around and make weird noises...